Data scientist and hacker. I <3 data and cheeseburgers.

I think this might be my very first LSL script, from back in 2005! This script indicates whether your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) account is online by changing the color of an object. You can configure it to either share your AIM ID publicly, or keep it private.

AIM Indicators in Second LIfe

This script uses the AIM web services API to check your online status — you only need to give it your username, not your password! This is not a proxy service. You can’t send messages through this script, just show your online status in SL.

Create a notecard called “Settings” with your avatar name on the first line* and your AIM username on the second line. If you do not want your AIM username shared, put the word “private” on the third line. If you do want it shared, change the line to anything else (“public”, or even blank will do). For example:

Ann Enigma
hilm1
private

The script polls the AIM server every 60 seconds, so give it a minute to update. It will reset if the owner clicks on it.

* I’m aware that you can get the avatar name via LSL — this was my first script, be nice!

One of the more popular objects that I created in Second Life is the News Stand. This charming device takes any query term and displays the two latest headlines from Yahoo! News. Clicking the news stand will load the top news story for the topic in a web browser.

I’ve gotten more requests to customize the script than I can possibly keep up with, so I’ve decided to release the code under a creative commons license. I hope you find it useful! Please let me know if you make improvements, so that I can link to them from here.

Unfortunately, parsing XML at all and RSS feeds in particular is extremely messy in LSL. This script doesn’t contain a general RSS feed parser — the parsing code was written specifically for the Yahoo! news feed.

Create a notecard called “Settings”, with a single line containing your search term. For example:

Educational Technology

The original news stand comes with these instructions, which may come in handy:

To set up the News Stand, simply open the "Settings" notecard, delete the default search term, and type in your own!
This gadget will refresh every 10 minutes, and will display the top two headlines on Yahoo! News for any search term. If you click on the news stand, it will load the top story in a web browser.
If you would like to build your own news stand, you can simply drag the script and "Settings" notecard into any object.

If you want the no-assembly-required version, the News Stand is available for L$350 at Xstreet SL Marketplace or from the ICT Library on Info Island in-world.

The original news stand object was created by (now former) student Kyle Pouliot.

One of my friendly librarian colleagues in SL asked if I had a script to generate dialogs and allow users to select notecards handy. I didn’t, so I coded it up. It seems like it could be useful to others, so here you go:

This script is in LSL, for Second Life. Just copy and paste it into a script, throw a few notecards into the object, and you’ll be ready to go!

// Notecard Selector
// by Ann Enigma
// This script presents users with a list of notecards in a dialog box, and allows them to select one
// Note: The names of the notecards must be less than 24 characters long
// This script is licenced under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License
// http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/
// configurable options
string message = "Which notecard would you like to read?"; // the message on the dialog box
integer command_channel = 616; // the channel on which to listen for commands (you probably won't need to change this)
// the script
list notecards;
default
{
state_entry() {
integer i = 0;
// read the title of each notecard into a list
for(i=0;i